Katie Dippold: 'It's a great time to be a woman in the film industry right now'

The scriptwriter has become 'the silent killer' of a new wave of female-driven US comedy. She wrote scripts for the acclaimed sitcom Parks and Recreation, and now her film debut, The Heat, starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as cop buddies, is tipped to be this summer's smash hit

'Why is doing what the guys do seen as the fun thing?': Katie Dippold photographed at Claridge's in London, June 2013. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

Katie Dippold: 'It's a great time to be a woman in the film industry right now'

The scriptwriter has become 'the silent killer' of a new wave of female-driven US comedy. She wrote scripts for the acclaimed sitcom Parks and Recreation, and now her film debut, The Heat, starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as cop buddies, is tipped to be this summer's smash hit

Saturday 20 July 2013 19.04 EDT
First published on Saturday 20 July 2013 19.04 EDT

When Katie Dippold was 12, she put on her first standup show at home. The audience wasn't huge: the only spectator was her mother.

"It was so painfully terrible," Dippold says. "Things that are funny in real life, if you transcribe them on to the page, aren't necessarily funny. I tried telling a funny story about a car alarm. My mom was politely smiling. It was just… so painful." Recoiling from the memory, she squirms in her chair. "I never did standup again."

But standup's loss turned out to be scriptwriting's gain. Dippold, who grew up in New Jersey and San Francisco, went on to become a staff writer for the hit US sitcom Parks and Recreation. Now 31, she has written what is set to become one of the movie hits of the summer. The Heat, starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, is an unusual beast – a female buddy cop movie that is half action caper, half genre parody.

Directed by Paul Feig, of Bridesmaidsfame, The Heat is Dippold's first full-length script – she wrote it on spec in 10 weeks and promptly sold it for $600,000 to producer Peter Chernin last February. It is unusual in Hollywood terms in that it features at its core a straight-talking female friendship and has barely a hint of a romantic entanglement for either of the lead characters. Did she come under pressure to include a love affair?

"Interestingly, I thought it would be much harder than it was," she says when we meet in a central London hotel. "I felt that, for this movie to be made, there would have to be a rewrite – like, one of them had to get married in the middle – but it was never forced on us.

"When I was growing up, one of my pet peeves was that women often felt like the fun thing would be doing what the guys were doing… I never liked that. I remember being out with my group of female friends and I was like, 'Why don't we do our fun thing and people can come to us?'"

That spirit is very much in evidence in The Heat, in which McCarthy's character (Mullins) swears like a trooper and beats up nefarious drug dealers without breaking sweat. When Bullock's character (Ashburn) visits Mullins's apartment and opens the fridge, she finds it stacked full of weaponry. Through the course of the film, the two of them form an uneasy alliance.

"There's a female friend I have, another comedian, and when we became friends, she was very frank and very direct and honest," says Dippold. "If I asked this friend her opinion, she was never overly polite. It was jarring but refreshing. You see that in the Melissa McCarthy character who chisels away at Sandra Bullock's character the whole movie."

Although McCarthy and Bullock had never met, Dippold says they instantly hit it off and are now "best friends in real life". In fact, the female friendship in The Heat provides the pivotal structure. Dippold took inspiration from classics of the genre – Lethal Weapon (which she claims she's seen "2,000 times"), Running Scared and 48 Hrs.

"I love Naked Gun!" she says, eyes lighting up. "I didn't think of Naked Gun when I was writing it but we were constantly talking about the spectrum of parody and drama and where on that spectrum our movie fell… We wanted everything to be comedy but things that could happen in real life so we were having fun with the genre but not parodying it, like Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead, which I love."

Speaking over the phone, director Paul Feig recalls that when he was sent Dippold's script, "it was one of the funniest I'd ever read. It was all there, which is really amazing because you almost never get scripts in that kind of shape. And we read tons."

He passed it on to his wife. "I never do anything without seeing if she likes it. I said: 'Read this. See if you find it as funny as I do.' Then I listened to her laughing in the bedroom for two hours."

When Dippold got the call that Feig was interested, she thought it was a prank. "I never believe anything good," she says. "I always think, 'This is a trap.'" In the end, she met Feig for lunch at an oyster bar in New York and found him to be "the nicest, kindest man".

Soon the film was in pre-production and Dippold received "a year's worth of notes crammed into a month. It was really hard work. Then once the actresses were attached, I was trying to write it more for their voices."

Does she find it hard to take criticism of her work? She wrinkles her nose. "I'm constantly training myself not to. If I ask for feedback I need to not take it hard when I get it. Feedback is feedback."

Dippold is sitting in an armchair with a straight-backed posture as she talks, almost as though she is about to be tested on something. She is wearing skinny red jeans and black pumps and seems shy and a touch nervous. She says that the whole thing has happened so quickly that there hasn't been time to get her head round the fact that everyone is telling her she has written a blockbuster hit. "I honestly feel it took a long time to understand what was happening."

She now lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, a movie executive, and is working on another script based on the idea of a mother-daughter action comedy, which will also be directed by Feig.

It's a been quite a journey from writing bad standup sketches in her childhood bedroom. She laughs. "Yes, but you have to let yourself do that before you're any good."

In many respects, this is a golden era for women in TV and movie comedy, with the likes of Tina Fey (30 Rock, Mean Girls, Date Night), Lena Dunham (Girls), Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project) and Liz Meriwether (New Girl) leading a creative resurgence in an industry that until relatively recently was dominated by a male, writers'-room culture.

Dippold says she was heavily influenced by Bridesmaids, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, which blazed the trail for a whole new kind of strong, female-driven observational comedy when it was released in 2011. Bridesmaids grossed almost $300m worldwide and was described by critics as a game-changer, ushering in a new era of subversive comedy for women beyond the traditional sentimentalised romcom.

But there is still some way to go. A recent study of 2012's 100 highest-grossing films found that only 28% of speaking roles went to women, the lowest ratio for five years. Behind the camera, women such as Dippold account for only 16% of the directors, screenwriters and producers of the 100 top films. A mere 4% of these films were directed by women.

Is Dippold a feminist?

"Yeah. I guess I can't imagine not being a feminist. I just believe everyone's equal. I think women are strong and should be able to achieve everything they want. If that's labelled feminism… isn't it just the norm?"

On Parks and Recreation, Dippold works closely with the show's star and co-writer Amy Poehler. A former Saturday Night Live cast member, Poehler has been nominated for seven Emmys and two Golden Globes. Dippold describes her as "hilarious but also just a really good person". She also cites Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a woman in comedy she particularly admires: "She's a genius. She just flows and is natural and at ease.

"It feels like a good time to be a woman in this industry to me," Dippold says. "I know of so many other female writers who are hilarious and smart. It felt like when I first started out, there was space for one woman to be on a [comedy] show or in an improv group. I started out feeling I had to be that one female, so I felt more competitive about it."

Having more women around, she says, "is so much more fun".

Dippold attributes her sharp observational skills to a peripatetic childhood. Her father works for Nestlé and her mother has a job in advertising design; Dippold and her older sister moved from New Jersey to San Francisco when Dippold was eight. She stayed there until she was 15, then the family relocated back to New Jersey.

Changing schools was "awful. I would eat lunch in the bathroom stall for a couple of weeks. It was the worst feeling in the pit of your stomach. I totally related to the Lindsay Lohan character in Mean Girls."

At home, she took refuge in writing stories, "always mysteries, never comedy". She would wrap the first and last page of the finished product in clingfilm to make it look more like a book cover. Her plots tended to tail off abruptly when she got bored.

"I wrote this story about my uncle's quest for love and you can tell I got bored at the climax because I'd set up this huge thing with an evil witch and that he'd never find love unless he killed the evil witch. Then you get to the final page and it's 'But then he found love and the witch died'."

Her inventiveness made her a gifted improviser and, after majoring in journalism at New Jersey's Rutgers University, Dippold wrote and performed regular shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCBT) in New York. From there, she went on to be a sketch regular on the US talkshow Late Night with Conan O'Brien, before making the leap into TV writing and then movie scripts. Her talent for thinking on her feet still comes in useful – on the set of The Heat, Dippold was encouraged to watch the filming and to pass Feig jokes on Post-It notes as she thought of them.

Along the way, Dippold applied for a job with the FBI, shortly after leaving college. The first question was whether she was in full-time employment, but because she was interning at the time, she said no. The second was whether she was fluent in any other languages – also a no. Finally she was asked if she had tried any drug more than three times, to which she replied in the affirmative. Unsurprisingly, she never heard back. But it all provided good background colour for The Heat. She read several books on law enforcement and there was a former FBI agent on set to help with crucial details like how to hold a gun.

Does Dippold think she's funny?

"It depends on the environment," she says. "I tend to be shy and then I'm pretty serious-sounding."

It's true that, in person, Dippold seems unexpectedly sober and thoughtful. There is probably still an element of shell shock at play, the impossibility of trying to grasp the reality of her situation – here she is, barely out of her 20s, sitting in a hotel room on a press junket for a big-budget film that she wrote, with Sandra Bullock just down the corridor.

Paul Feig laughs when I tell him this. "She seems so reserved and put together," he says of Dippold. "And then the most outrageous things come out of her mouth. She's the silent killer."